KNOW YOUR RIGHTS
we need to determine whether your driving was danger- ous. Clearly, here, there is a factual dispute and it will come down to who the court believes.
Your neighbour says that you drove towards him and di- rectly over his foot. That would be dangerous. The stan- dard is where someone’s driving falls “far below” that of a careful and competent driver and is “obviously danger- ous in all the circumstances”. It is safe to say that driving at a person and deliberately running over their foot would be considered dangerous.
But you have a different account – and your account would not necessarily be dangerous. If you were trying to go around him and he has been moving in front of you, then we can argue that a careful and competent driver would have acted in exactly the same way as you in the circumstances – even if you have run over his foot acci- dentally.
The back story is a double-edged sword. We can use it against your neighbour to show that he has this vendetta and any examples that you have of his maliciously report- ing you would help to damage his credibility. But at the same time the prosecution might use that against us to show that this was a road rage incident and that your anger had been building up over time.
So it is going to come down to your word against his. But importantly the Crown is under a duty to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that your driving was dangerous. All we must do is cast a doubt on that suggestion in order to secure an acquittal. That would be our aim.
Q
I’ve been done for drink-driving and I need help. I was stopped by police and she said she could smell alcohol. I’d had a couple of drinks at the pub. She asked me to blow into the machine and
it was over the limit. So I was arrested. At the police sta- tion I just couldn’t blow into their machine properly. I was trying my best but she was saying I was not trying hard enough. I managed to give one sample which I think was about 70 which she said was twice the limit but she asked me to give another breath sample and I couldn’t give it. I’d had a chest infection the day before and I was really having difficulty breathing. Then I was released and now I’ve been charged with failing to give a specimen of breath. Is this the same as drink-driving? Am I already guilty because I was over the limit anyway?
A
No, this is not the same as drink driving. When a person is arrested under suspicion of driving with excess alcohol the arresting officer will take the suspect into a police station and require them to provide a specimen for analysis. Roadside breath
specimens cannot be used as an evidential sample – ef- fectively they are screening devices to determine whether
MARCH 2019
you are above the limit or not. If you provide a roadside specimen and it fails then you must go to the station where you are required to provide two evidential speci- mens. One is not enough - you will be charged if you only give one specimen.
For failing to provide a specimen you would be a risk of a minimum 12-month disqualification, but going by the one reading you gave I would suggest you would be look- ing at a disqualification in the region of 18 to 24 months and perhaps a low-level community order as well.
Call us for advice. It’s important that we get to work quickly.
Firstly we have to look at whether you have a defence. There are various stages to the procedures that we need to examine, for example the police should properly re- quire you to provide a specimen of breath and have to warn you of the consequences if you fail to provide. If they fail to warn you then that will automatically lead to an acquittal. In addition they have to give you a fair op- portunity and clear instructions on how to blow into the machine.
But ultimately if they have followed their procedures properly then it is only a defence if we can show that you had a “reasonable excuse” for failing to provide. A rea- sonable excuse must be born out of an incapability, so we would have to show that you were incapable of providing. This could be because of your chest infection, but we would need medical evidence to show that this infection caused your inability to blow into the machine.
Whilst it is different to drink-driving and you may have a chance of defending it, the difficulty would be that the court would see that you have provided one specimen at the roadside and another at the station and would be sus- picious of your inability to provide just one more. And in addition they will see that the ones you did provide were over the limit so will be even more suspicious of you being “unable” to provide another one.
So if we can’t defend you, we may simply decide to miti- gate to try to keep the disqualification to a minimum and hopefully avoid community orders. By pleading guilty at the earliest opportunity we would have the best chance of doing that.
Call us now for free advice.
This impartial advice has been provided by Patterson Law Solicitors Patterson Law - 0800 021 7753
www.pattersonlaw.co.uk
81
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96
